Investment Director, Henry Alty argues that the pandemic provides a catalyst to accelerate the next stage of process automation, which will drive fundamental changes in how we work.
The COVID-19 pandemic could prove to be the ultimate automation accelerant.
For one thing, every business is now determined to seek out cost efficiencies in a challenging market. More fundamentally, it has proven an urgent reminder of the need for businesses to digitise and operate with greater agility and responsiveness, as well as to improve their resilience.
At Gresham House we believe that the need to seamlessly co-ordinate remote staff working will step change the use of process and intelligent automation tools, with technology-enabled workflows to bring everything together. We have been investing in this area both before and during the pandemic, with recent investments including Clarilis and Rainbird, and successful exits such as Symphony Ventures.
Moving to the next level
Process automation is not a new idea, of course. Many companies will already have completed a first round of automation, embracing tools that replace the need for manual labour to complete repetitive tasks such as data entry. Now, however, the opportunity is to go further: to bring automation into the heart of the businesses, moving from single tasks to transforming workflows.
To do this, firms will need to re-consider how they do what they do rather than simply digitising ‘paper processes’.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on this imperative, with businesses required to find ways of working that deliver efficient outcomes even though their staff are displaced and dispersed. But the need for better orchestration and workflow efficiency will not disappear after the crisis; the move to different styles of working looks set to be permanent.
There will remain an ongoing need for resilient processes that can withstand further disruption.
Beyond this, the next level of automation is adding intelligence into processes, and automating decisioning as an overlay to basic process automation.
Gresham House investee Rainbird is a great example of this, allowing businesses to model the decisions of their smartest employees’ thought processes and then make those decisions rapidly and consistently.
We see intelligent automation gaining traction as the advantages of faster, more consistent decision making begin to stack up. These will include greater speed of response, improved levels of customer service and accelerated agility.
Pick the tools for the job
We believe that no single tool will provide all the automation that an individual business is seeking. Rather, businesses will need to think through and define their objectives, and then deploy a combination of tools to help achieve them.
The key to constructing such an ecosystem in the most effective way possible lies in focusing on the outcome required, rather than starting with the tools themselves. Process automation vendors will naturally be keen to persuade businesses of the merits of their particular technologies, often making conflicting claims about what they can deliver.
But a concerted focus on what the business wants to achieve, and then working backwards to identify the tools required to get there, will help cut through the hyperbole. As with our investment in process automation consultancy Symphony Ventures, there will be an ongoing need for smart consultancies to assist with that transformation work.
Different approaches will suit different types of businesses. For larger organisations, the best route to process automation may lie in working with providers able to engineer systems and tools around their processes, accommodating their bespoke processes.
For smaller businesses lacking the resources (or the complexity) for such a build process, off-the-shelf tools will often make sense, with the added advantage of imposing a best in class workflow where the provider has a deep understanding of the relevant vertical.
Recent Gresham House investee Clarilis is one good example of this, automating the production of legal documents and ancillaries to free up lawyers’ time. The business has its own support lawyers in house, and so is able to provide a fully managed service drawing on its experience of having automated similar documents many times before rather than leaving law firms to do so themselves.
There will be no one-size-fits-all solution and many organisations will adopt both bespoke and off the shelf models in different circumstances. The important thing here is to stay focused on the end goal, rather than becoming preoccupied with the technologies on offer.
The start of a new future of work
Process and workflow automation will be fundamental to driving broader digital transformation within businesses, with simple business cases based on cost savings but in reality much greater benefits in having efficient, auditable, resilient processes.
COVID-19 will accelerate the need for process automation, as with so many other digital transformations, as a strategic goal rather than a tactical play.
It also underpins our broader focus on software and services which assist people in doing the ‘most human’ elements of their jobs, as the pure process elements are automated away. Making sure that talent recruitment, onboarding, retention, development and training, and collaboration are all undertaken as effectively as possible will be critical to successful delivery within companies, and in a remote working world all of these will require software support.
Gresham House is actively looking to fund those scale-up companies helping to deliver software and services for both automation technologies and the new ‘future of work’.
